Unscheduled Visits: Health & Wellness Center

One of the main goals of the Board of Trustees of the Employee Benefits Fund when they opened the Health & Wellness Center was to provide our people with a better medical experience. That goal is a never ending work in progress. One of the biggest issues impacting our ability to reach that goal is the tremendous amount of unscheduled visits that occur each day.

The number of patient visits at the Health & Wellness Center can run anywhere between 60 & 80 patients per day. Of those visits, it is not uncommon to have 40+ as 'walk-ins'; our terminology for unscheduled visits.

As I'm sure you can well imagine, walk-ins or unscheduled visits have a huge impact on the overall operations of the facility. One of the biggest issues would be waiting times, something that we watch very closely. We hate to have patients waiting for long periods of time as you would in a normal doctor's office since that contradicts our objective of providing a better medical experience. In a perfect world all patients would be scheduled visits and the operation would run like a Swiss watch, but we understand that is highly unlikely to ever occur. The best we can hope for is that if your issue is not critical that you let us schedule you into an available time slot.

Consistently, the most hectic and busiest times in the facility are between the hours of 8am and 10am. During these hours, we are facilitating the firefighter physicals and fasting lab draws, while also trying to accommodate patients that are coming off shift and who live at a distance away from the facility.

We completely understand that there will be times of emergent or urgent medical need where scheduling an appointment is just not practical and we will always welcome those patients with open arms. And, of course, true emergent or urgent medical issues will go to the head of the line!

Over the next few weeks and months, we will be evaluating several solutions to try and resolve the problems we continually run into with trying to see everyone in a timely manner. To begin with, we will be adding more appointment slots in the morning and we will be giving absolute priority to scheduled appointments, except in the case of true emergent and urgent medical situations.

We understand that when you or a loved one is not feeling well that you want to be seen that day, and we will accommodate you, we have never turned anyone away. But we ask that you call and let us fit you into a time slot so that you don't have to wait for an inordinate amount of time when you get here.

It is unfortunate, but with our tremendous patient load we have no choice but to really stress that patients that show up without an appointment will end up waiting, sometimes for an hour or more, especially in the mornings when we are the busiest. Please do us and yourself a favor and call to schedule an appointment. We know that if you are sick, you would want to be seen as soon as possible and we will see you, but we are confident you would rather wait at home than in our waiting room.